The Best Books We Read This Week
With examples including rebellious colonists’ proud adoption of “Yankee Doodle” as their anthem—the song was initially sung by British troops, to make fun of supposedly unsophisticated locals—and the emergence of blackface minstrelsy, Zelnik shows how white settlers used playfulness and humor to position themselves as the rightful owners of the land, to the exclusion not only of foppish Brits but also of Indigenous and Black Americans.
